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Download the “Reveal Your Potential” PDF
Most people know more than they realize.
Most people can do more than they thought possible.
Most people can achieve goals they thought were out of reach.
With our help, people can reveal their full potential.
Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) is a proven and widely-respected process that helps people reflect on, identify, organize, and describe their lifelong and life-wide learning. This record of learning can then be presented in a way that others can recognize and value.
The Prior Learning Centre is a nationally-recognized centre of excellence in providing PLAR services. We’re a collaborative, community-based, non-profit organization located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, dedicated to providing innovative and high quality PLAR services and programs across a wide variety of settings, to both individuals and employers.
Most people underestimate what they know and can do
Interestingly, what we know and can do tends to become invisible to us over time. As you become familiar with the new task or job, you gradually stop thinking consciously about the knowledge and skills you have – you just do what needs to be done. So we forget that what might seem simple and straightforward for you—from sewing a piece of clothing, to casting a fishing rod, introducing a speaker, or building a shed—can seem extremely complicated and intimidating to someone else. In other words, you know much more than you think you know.
All learning deserves to be recognized
Experiential learning, and the skills that go with it, often goes unrecognized by both you and—equally important—the world around you. It is not, of course, that you’ve stopped learning after leaving school—on the contrary, your knowledge, skills and talents are essential to the economy, your workplaces, communities and families. It’s just that nobody pays much attention to these learning achievements. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Introducing PLAR
This is where Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) can make a crucial, confidence-boosting difference. PLAR helps people reflect on, identify, organize, and describe learning from throughout their life. This includes learning from formal settings like schools and professional programs, and also informal learning acquired at home, in the community, in hobbies and travel, for example. This record of learning, and the confidence that comes with creating it, is a crucial tool in the pursuit of new opportunities.